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"His kingdom is of revolt, his orders are from hatred," on goes the dirge-theme, De Sade revised by Dr. Seuss. José Mojica Marins' Dead of Night, each sketch more scabrous than the last. A mise en scène of garter-belted legs and staring plastic visages for the opening tale, from the raucous discotheque to the shop of the dollmaker bearded like Tolstoy. The gang of greedy hoodlums and the brood of shapely daughters, violation and retribution, it all goes into the secret family recipe. The impressionistic second episode is scored to a dissonant montage of music boxes, calliopes, bells and chorales, plus a dash of Stroheim in a pan from a street funeral to a necking couple. The poor balloon seller can't have the privileged beauty of his dreams in life, she's available at last in the crypt, the camera tilts from the crucifix on the wall to the stiff in undies about to be ravished (cf. Buñuel's Viridiana). Necrophiliac impulses not only go unpunished here, they perversely bridge the social chasm separating the characters. A debate on cerebral reason versus brutish instinct kicks off the final segment in a TV studio, the Professor pontificates malevolently, unseen but for unmistakable long fingernails. The newscaster is intrigued, dinner at the dark castle sorts things out. "I have ways to prove my theories. Bring your wife along." Torture, blasphemy, cannibalism come fast and furious in the sideshow of depravities, a matter of "ideologia." (Joel M. Reed pays ample tribute in Blood Sucking Freaks.) The ecstasy of chaos for the "end of the beginning, beginning of the end" of Brazil '68, Marins welcomes the apocalypse with a Hallelujah Chorus. With Vany Miller, George Serkeis, Íris Bruzzi, Oswaldo de Souza, Luís Sérgio Person, Nidi Reis, and Nivaldo Lima. In black and white.
--- Fernando F. Croce |